How to Conditionally Format Individual Rows or Columns in Tableauīefore we share the trick to conditionally formatting individual rows or columns in Tableau, we would be remiss if we did not mention that we originally saw this documented by Dan Montgomery of in his post, My Favorite Tableau Trick for Work: MIN(1).įurther, we first heard about the trick from one of our Data Viz Heroes, Peter Gilks, of. This unlocks a great deal of formatting flexibility that is not apparent by default in Tableau. This post shares a trick for formatting the marks on rows or columns independently of each other. While Tableau certainly has many encoding options available through the Marks Cards, it can seem a little “all or nothing”.įor example, if you place a measure on the Color Marks Card, then all marks on the view are colored. This is very easy to do in Excel because you can modify every single individual cell exactly as you wish.
One common such example relates to conditional formatting, and the ability to modify individual rows or columns. While there are tremendous advantages to using both programs, we have seen firsthand how learned behavior for Excel can become a barrier to adoption of Tableau.
While there is some overlap between the reporting outputs of the two software programs, it can take some time to understand how the two programs differ as well as best fit together. Being that we almost all learned Excel first, it is natural to approach a tool like Tableau for the first time with some preconceived notions about how we think it should work. Digital Analytics Platform ImplementationĪlmost every Tableau user has also been, or still is, a heavy Excel user.